For those of you who’ve been following the project here, you know I’ve been writing a lot of poems based around science, and specifically the disciplines of astrophysics and particle physics. They have tended to ask the reader to shift his/her viewpoint and maybe become uncomfortable with the poem. In particular, this stems from the poems’ atheistic / agnostic viewpoint, which is in conflict with the majority of (at least) American sense of order. A lot of them have also been a lot less grounded in the human experience, and more so in the explanation of how I see the universe.
Some may even categorize these poems as Romantic.
It’s not that I see these poems as failures, at all. But I have doubts about these poems’ abilities to connect with readers who may find the very one-sided nature of the cosmology uncomfortable or even offensive to their worldview. Unless reading it as a requirement, why would you read something you don’t enjoy?
This may sound, so far, like I’m about to compromise my own viewpoints and worldview. Which I’m not going to do.
The poems I’ve written since the Juniper Summer Writing Institute have reached another level. I’m not sure how to describe that plane, other than it being less concerned with my worldview, and more with my experience within that worldview.
The poem I posted in the previous post is a good example of what I’m talking about. It’s not focused around the science, it’s not really even related to science in any obvious way. Most of the other poems I’ve drafted have more directly addressed the universe, but mostly in a circumstantial way as opposed to being the center of the poem.
I feel this is a step in the right direction for the thesis project, and one with more possibility and need than the path I had been on previously. And while this change of course will necessitate a rewrite of a lot of the work I’ve done on the project so far, I also feel that the end result will be a better, more cohesive piece than otherwise would have happened.